As data rates increase to meet demand for higher data throughput, signals transmitted through a communication channel are increasing susceptible to corruption by frequency-dependent signal loss of the communication channel, such as inter-symbol interference (ISI), and other noise, such as crosstalk, echo, signal dispersion, and distortion. A receiver may use an automatic gain control (AGC) circuit to compensate for channel loss, and a decision feedback equalizer (DFE) to remove ISI and other noise by using a feedback loop based on previously decided symbols from the received signal. The receiver may automatically adapt its components, e.g., the AGC circuit and DFE circuit to the receiver signals to improve bit error rate (BER) performance. As the data rate increases, high speed communication protocols have higher timing requirements for the receiver adaptation time.
Accordingly, it would be desirable and useful to provide an improved way of implementing receiver adaptation including AGC adaptation and equalizer adaptation.